This can be anything from a downloadable book on the best social media practices to a quality infographic that your audience can easily share. In offering something to your audience that they can’t find anywhere else, you’re making connections and building relationships that will prove mutually beneficial.

Build relationships through Twitter chats

Another social media tactic you can use to build relationships is through a Twitter chat. If you’re not familiar with what a Twitter chat is, our Matt Diederichs explains that “using a shared hashtag, users meet at a predetermined time to discuss issues of community relevance. These chats generate tons of conversation, and build deep connections between the people partaking and brands who host.”

As a social engagement tool, Twitter chats usually prove successful but have been underutilized by many companies and brands, who are missing great opportunities for building their social media communities. If you find yourself not knowing where to start with organizing a Twitter chat, you might find our guide to “Everything You Need to Set Up Your First Twitter Chat” helpful.

Be consistent

Once you start establishing relationships, you want to be able to maintain the trust that your audience has put in you. As a social media tactic, consistency means more than just posting at a certain time everyday. Are you responding to certain tweets but not others? This indicates a lack of engagement consistency, which can be off-putting for your audience and followers.

However, one of the most important aspects of consistency is undoubtedly in the tone you’re using on social media. While posting frequency, timing, and engagement are all important, your brand voice is what develops your relationship and loyalty with the audience. You want to ensure that your business’ social media accounts are portraying your brand voice consistently across channels through things like tone, logos, images, sharing habits, and language.

Olsy Sorokina suggests the following as a way of checking in with your brand identity on social media:

“A quick way to check your brand identity on social from time to time is what I call “the Twitter search test.” Can your customers easily find and recognize you by typing your name into the Search bar on Twitter? (This applies to Facebook or LinkedIn, too—any platform that auto-fills matching accounts as one types the query into the Search bar).”

Use engaging images

A picture is worth a thousand words, so you need to consider what message you want to send through the images you use on social media. As this infographic from Social Media Today shows, “content with relevant images gets 94 percent more views than content without.” Furthermore, 90 percent of the information transmitted to the brain is visual, which is processed 60,000 times faster than text.

If these numbers alone don’t convince you, think about some of your favorite posts on social media. There’s a good chance that many of those you’re thinking about are either completely image-based or contain relevant images. A paragraph written about cats being scared of cucumbers just doesn’t have the same effect as the actual video.

While the evidence for using images in your social media strategy is overwhelming, it can be hard to know where to start in choosing the best ones for the job. If you need some help with this, our guide on “How to Choose Social Media Images” is a helpful resource for taking advantage of this important social media tactic.